Monday, June 7, 2010

June 6 – June is Bustin’ Out All Over!

It’s June in the Abbey, and we are spending it gazing more consistently upon the God of creation than even the beauties thereof!

It is a beautiful June! The mornings are still cool, the evenings are still and clear and pleasant. Mourning doves coo until the sun comes over the eastern edge of the world. Robins are plump and fledgling red birds wing from tree to tree.

In Cor Unum, for all these beauties and all the joys of life, we seek to enjoy, to appreciate, to IMBIBE more of God than these, by far.

Does He refresh us? Then we shall be refreshed! Does He inspire, awaken, fill and excite us? Then we shall be wholly found in such a glorified condition of fullness and inspiration, of watchful, wide awake anticipation!

Fanny Crosby, the blind, God-seeking psalmist, to whom so many of our most beautiful and poignant hymns can be attributed, is remembered by the phrase, “Take the world, but give me Jesus!”

To the new postulant, the joys and discoveries of life in the Abbey are sweet, like home-coming, and intriguing, like a game of divine hide-and-seek in a palace where she hopes to live forever. She loves the chapel and the prayer stalls, the quietness and austerity of “our cell,” the solemnity of the Refectory and meals eaten in thoughtful silence.

Let us make of this month a wonderful and effectual season of looking to God in everything and of finding Him in all things, since He is there. Everywhere.

Let us give Him our attention, worship, devotion, and obedience in the cool of the morning and the heat of the day. Let us take wing and find Him in the top branches of our lives, and do a little nesting there. Let us enjoy the pleasures and prepare for the heat of summer and of life in Cor Unum. His nearness remains.

Psalm 27:4

It has been my privilege to compile a "monastic" devotional for everyday life and for women in all walks of life. We take part in this "Cyber Monastery" for the purpose of growth in devotion and the "practice of the Presence of God."

Although we may never meet, we share this cloister and this life through our prayer and worship and small, determined steps in godliness.

Neither Catholicism nor holy orders are required here; this is the most ancient monasticism, the kind that took Anna into the temple in the second chapter of Luke, Moses into the Tent of Meeting, and Paul into seclusion in the early days of his conversion. Within our families and our churches, day and night, alone or in company, we are "marketplace monastics," living to bring pleasure to the heart of God.

Join us - your new "habit" awaits ... here in Cor Unum Abbey.

"One thing have I desired of the Lord; that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple."